"The score tonight is 148 for Romney, 214 for Obama. (Journalist's question: "So Obama leading?") Leading for the moment, still four days to go, the next ballot will be on Tuesday night at about midnight."

Manager Alain da Silva says the vote is a time-honoured tradition for his American patrons and says the success rate is because the expatriates have their fingers on the pulse of U.S. politics.

A pulse that's read so accurately that roughly every four years around the first week of November, Harry's Bar can expect a call from the U.S. embassy in Paris unofficially asking how the straw poll went.